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Saturday, 16 February 2013

The Origin of Web Browsers!

Jeff Nelson is often considered the "inventor" of Chrome OS, but it is in fact the inventor of Google OS: it began to develop its system several months before the start of work on Chrome. His idea was to develop a system that rotates and Web Apps that would be kind of a big browser on top of a Linux kernel has chosen to Firefox. Ironically, Firefox OS today is not very different from that principle.
In 2006, Nelson was developing Web Apps for Google and was particularly frustrated by existing browsers, including their slow start.

While SSDs are still very expensive, his whole system was placed on a RAM-disk, extremely fast launch Firefox went from 45 seconds to 1 second.
The RAM-drives have the disadvantage of losing all their data if the power is off: it was not a problem for Nelson, as were all the apps and Web Apps that all data was backed up online. Even today, Google boasts that Chrome OS prevents any data loss.
But at the time, Google executives were not convinced by the proposed Nelson, who resumed certainly a well-known concept, the thin client, but wanted to get him out of businesses and institutions. The main criticism was the lack of an offline mode, a default set from the local cache with HTML5.

Why Nelson chose WebKit browser rather than Firefox? He does not say, but his choice may be related to the bad reputation of Apple's, she took three years to make open-source WebKit completely. In 2006, WebKit open source was only a few months, while Gecko was eight years. The decision to abandon Opera Presto divided in favor of WebKit web players today, with arguments reminiscent of the time.
Some, including Nitot and behind the Mozilla Foundation, worry that the project led by the heavyweights Apple and Google stifles innovation that only competition and guarantee diversity.

They remind Opera is behind many innovations such as tabs, integrated search, gesture shortcuts, "top sites", etc.., A feature that could be erased with this rallying WebKit, piloted by two companies have their own objectives.
Others recall with the WHATWG, Apple developers, Mozilla and Opera have greatly evolved in recent years the Web (HTML5, Microdata, etc.), and there is no reason to change that. They point out that while they share the same engine, Safari and Chrome are very different, Google and Apple working on two different JavaScript engines, two different concepts of interface and two different synchronization services. And there is no reason Opera does not continue to distinguish these three aspects.